Answer:
Most Soviet Union client states in Eastern Europe were ruled by Communist governments.
Explanation:
At the end of the Second World War, there was an agreement between the Allies, according to which each state would temporarily occupy the territories conquered during the war, before re-establishing the order of the occupied European nations. For the most part, the territories occupied by the Anglo-Americans became liberal democracies with a capitalist economy aligned with the US, while the Soviet-occupied territories became socialist countries aligned with the USSR. This situation led to the division of Germany, where the Soviet occupation sector became East Germany, while the American, English and French sectors became West Germany.
Eastern European members of the Warsaw Pact: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany, were satellite states controlled by Moscow. While the Soviet leaders argued that the Warsaw Pact nations were all the same, and would enter into a mutual alliance, the reality was different and decisions were actually made in the Soviet Union and imposed by force if necessary. For example, when the Polish Communist leaders tried to elect Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary, an ultimatum was imposed by the Soviet military guarding Poland, ordering them to withdraw the election of Gomulka, to avoid being crushed by Soviet tanks.
The Prague Spring in 1968 led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the other nations of the Warsaw Pact. To justify the action, the USSR cited the Brezhnev Doctrine, which advocated the duty for all socialist countries to protect another socialist state from the fall to capitalism. The Western bloc interpreted the Brezhnev doctrine as an expression of Moscow's authority over other communist states.
US political analysts and the American public were so confident that Eastern European countries were client states in the hands of the USSR that Gerald Ford's insistence during a debate in the 1976 presidential election campaign that Eastern Europe was not in fact dominated by the Soviet Union was considered a blunder, leading the opponent Jimmy Carter to reply that he wanted to see Ford convince the Czechs and Poles that they were not living under Soviet domination. Likewise, in 1987 President Ronald Reagan, in a speech at the Berlin Wall, did not challenge the East German leader, but directly Soviet leader Michail Gorbachev to break down the wall.
